by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 11, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

The new year has brought quite an abundance of snow days. In fact, it seems as if most of this year has been taken up with snow and ice days. I have to say that I haven’t minded them at all. I know for some, unexpected days off mean time that is difficult to fill. Especially when there are several in a row, or if you have children who are getting restless, the days off can get pretty long. For me, suddenly having most of a day open, away from the usual schedule, is something that I experience as an unexpected gift. Even if I’m doing work at home, it is time out of the usual time and that is a good thing.

This past week, being around home more than usual, my thoughts quickly turned to all the areas of the house that I want to go through and clean out. There are the books I have not read in a long time and probably won’t in the future. There are the clothes that haven’t been worn in years. There’s the office that needs all kinds of organizing.

And as I saw the areas that needed clearing out, I was reminded again of all the stuff that I have and all the stuff that I really don’t need. I have a house that is 1,500 square feet—which is a lot for one person. But by American standards, my house isn’t all that big. It is not uncommon anymore for houses to be 3,000 or 4,000 square feet. But I know I am very fortunate to have the amount of space that I have. And having been in the house for a few years I have come to see an interesting phenomenon—you may have experienced this in the place where you live as well—that the space that I have has tended to fill up with stuff. Interesting the way that seems to happen. And I know from talking with people that I’m not alone in that.

I know that I have all that I need and more. I think I know, in fact, how very fortunate I am. And yet that doesn’t seem to stop me from looking through all those ads in the Sunday paper and see what I don’t seem to have and then I think that well, maybe I need that DVD player or that (fill in the blank). Seems like no matter how much stuff I have, there is always something more that I am wanting. 

I was recently talking with a member of the church who told me that she and her husband filled up their house and when the house next door came up for sale they bought it. They created studios for each of them in the house and that now they have filled up that house up with stuff as well.

In the culture that we live in, if we have the resources—or at least the credit line—to buy the things we want, then we most often do. They may not be things that we really need, but still, if we can, we get them. And our inclination to get stuff is certainly something that we pass along to children. I once worked with a woman who decided to give her 4-year-old daughter a television set for Christmas. The child opened the large package on Christmas morning and the first words out of her mouth were to ask: “Where’s the VCR?” This was the time before DVDs, but you might be able to imagine such a scene with any number of variations.

Traveling in Southeast Asia last year very much opened my eyes to the amount of stuff that we as Americans have compared to most other people in the world. We consume more than people in any other country. I knew that before I left, but it became very obvious on my travels. In Vietnam I visited a house that by the standards of that country was a pretty nice house. It was a little smaller than my house here in Portland but 10 or 12 people lived there. The other thing that jumped out at me was how relatively little stuff they had inside the house compared to most houses here. If you were to take everything in the house and put it on a scale, I bet it would maybe be one-forth or one third of the stuff in my house.

In Laos I was invited into the small house of an older couple. They had basic wooden platforms where they slept. They had very basic cooking equipment and a shelf with some spices. They had a basket or two and a couple of blankets. They had a very small mirror and a faded photo or two of their children. Their home is very, very basic and it is hard to imagine most Americans living in such a space.

In the wonderful book entitled Material World, Peter Menzel goes around the world and photographs families in front of their homes with all of their possessions. It is striking to see how little most people have compared to the Americans in front of their large house with so many possessions.  For most people they have some basic necessities of living. The Americans have an enormous spread of stuff outside their garage.

Of course another thing that became apparent to me is that the people with so little by our standards seem to be so happy. They don’t seem to be lacking, particularly, especially once the basics of life are covered. But there is a kind of ease that just doesn’t seem as apparent here.

The travel experiences have led me to look at my own home—and my own possessions—in a different way. I’m more aware of my privilege and all that I have that I really don’t need. And, that said, I’m also aware of how much I am a product of my culture and how I don’t seem to have a problem acquiring more stuff.

We live in a culture that values consumption. We are taught to value ourselves, on some level, by what we have or by what we don’t have. One of the main messages that we received after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 was that our job was to keep consuming and to not let the economy suffer. It almost feels like our role as consumer is more pronounced than our role as citizen. There’s more awareness, it sometimes seems, of the newest thing to buy than there is awareness of the issues before us as a nation. The message that we receive is that we are what we consume and that can go pretty deep, particularly, I think, when it comes to young people. A lot of value is placed on this. The more we have, the more important we must be.

A couple years ago I read an interview with Ivana Trump, famous ex-wife of New York tycoon Donald Trump. She talked about her spending habits and what money meant to her. She talked about the joy of spending money on her yacht. She talked about not liking to shop but having to go to a department store to shop for bras. The interviewer asked her: “So how much does a beautiful bra have to cost to make you think twice about buying it?” “I really don’t look. This is the time when I go to Bloomingdale’s to the fourth floor. I go there for two hours and I buy 2,000 of the black, 2,000 of the beige, 2,000 of the white. And I ship them around between the homes and the boat and that’s the end of it for maybe half a year when I have to do to all over again.”

Ivana’s story may be a little extreme, but she went on to talk about how even she enjoys going to Costco. “When I open a house in Palm Beach or send a boat from America to Europe, I take my housemen and housekeeper and we go to Costco. I have a ball. At Costco you buy in big quantities—we buy the salt and pepper and the herbs.”

“Why is it fun?” the interviewer asked.

“I don’t know, you go, ‘wow, $3.99 for a bottle of virgin olive oil.’ I honestly don’t know how much it costs normally. But somehow they make you feel good about it.”

I know the few times that I’ve gone to Costco I tend to feel good about all those bargains. But then I get it all home and a few months later figure out that I really didn’t need as much as I bought. But when I’m there, I can’t seem to resist.

Whether we go to Costco or not, most of us have the ways that we, in particular, indulge. It can happen in all kinds of forms. It may be a love of books. It may be a love of clothes. It may be a love of kitchenware. It may be spending on our grandchildren or our pets.

I heard a woman interviewed on the radio a couple months back. Her particular thing is buying little outfits for her pet birds. She spends, if I recall, in the range of $30 to $40 a week on these outfits. Apparently they have quite a wardrobe. Now, I don’t know a lot about birds, but I have to wonder just what this is like for the birds. She said that she was convinced that the birds loved their little outfits, but I have to admit that I’m skeptical.

I have to say that I scoffed at this person when I heard the story. I thought to myself that I would never spend that kind of money on my pet. Then last month I was at the monthly pug gathering with my puppy, Lucy. You may have heard of the pug gatherings. They happen on the last Sunday of the month and they can draw upwards of a hundred pugs at once.

Well, in December it was pretty cold and rainy and only a few die-hards showed up. There were probably only a dozen dogs there. But of those dozen, a couple of the dogs had on little all-weather outfits. Imagine little pugs with Gore-Tex jackets lined with fleece. The jackets went over the back and they had Velcro fasteners on the belly. In the back by the tail, there was an opening and little flaps went under to fasten it in the back. In the front it had a little collar. Well, there we are in the rain and I have to admit that I wanted to get one of those jackets for my little Lucy.

Now I am not at all sure she would actually want a jacket. She didn’t particularly seem to mind the rain. And I didn’t see the other dogs playing with the coated dogs more than the others. And yet in that moment, I suddenly wanted to get one of those jackets… well… just because it is possible.

I have resisted the urge since that time and now I’m not so sure Lucy needs such a jacket. I did recently receive a catalog in the mail that has, among other things, custom clothes for dogs. I have not sent in an order yet, and don’t know if I will. But I think that is so often how it is. Those advertisements really do work. I don’t think I need something and then… all of a sudden… I begin to think that I do. I have, in the last few years, tried to become aware of this and I have tried to slow down when I am thinking that I need something. If I wait, more often than not, the urgency will go away.

And I have learned to apply what a friend calls the full price test when I want to buy something on sale. When I come upon something that is discounted, and I have an urge to buy it, I ask myself if I would be wanting to buy it if it were at full price and not on sale. If the answer is no, then I likely won’t buy it. I have come to know that if the real reason for buying something is to fill something in me that feels empty, that is probably not the reason to be buying it.

There are so many ways that we can find hits that will quickly fill us up in the culture. You can go down the list of addictions that are so common in our society. It may be eating or drinking or sex or shopping. It may be gambling. But clutter can take all kinds of forms. It may be the energy we put into making sure that our kids do better in everything than the kids down the street. Or maybe it is the energy that we put into staying angry at somebody else and thus keeping us from looking at our own stuff.

In the end, however it is we indulge, however it is we get focused, we find that it doesn’t really satisfy and we are left wanting something else. Like a good dose of sugar, we may feel full for a time, but then we quickly feel the letdown and we want something more substantial.

When space is taken up for one thing in our lives, it usually means that there is not space for something else. We do make choices and we are conscious of those choices. But I wonder if too often we are pulled in a direction simply because it is there, because that is what speaks louder than something else. Our lives get full of the things we don’t so much choose but simply have something placed before us. And in the end, what we have doesn’t feel so much like what we have chosen but what has been chosen for us. When we make resolutions for the new year, this might be what we are getting at. We know on some level we want to do some things differently and yet so often it seems that we keep with the old ways of being because that is simply what we know best.

There is probably some magic line between having the things we need to help us feel grounded and having so much stuff that we can’t begin to get out from underneath it. For each of us that is probably different, but for each of us, it is important to know where that is for us.

Organizational experts will say that there is no magic solution to organizing our lives or even our stuff. But they probably would says the steps include getting our things sorted out, being flexible about change, and most of all, finding the space for things that are the most important and making space for what is new.

In my own life the words that have been coming up a lot for me are being versus doing. For me this gets at how I would like to be in the world. When I am in doing mode, it is to get things done, it is to complete a list. When I am in being mode I’m not so concerned about what gets done as the way that it happens. It is tending to the relationships in my life. It is about being aware of what is going on around me. It is about giving thanks for what I have and being aware of the blessings in my life. Doing is about moving on to the next thing I have to do. I don’t know that it necessarily means getting more or less done as it means being mindful about whatever it is that I’m doing.

I find myself starting to simply ask what I’m doing at any given time. Even if it means that I am in the midst of something I have to do, I ask myself how I hope to be as I do it. If I’m headed for a meeting that I may not particularly want to be at, maybe I can step back and think about the people I will be with. Maybe I can shift my expectations for what will happen there.

Sometimes the changes we make in life happen the way we would like them to happen. We make our plan and over time we come to realize what it is we want to accomplish. But life is not always so neat and orderly. Most often, actually, it is not. Sometimes life throws us into chaos and it takes a long time to come out from that chaos, but in the end our lives look different and what we have may not be what we expected.

On Christmas night year before last, my cousin and her husband lost their house and everything that they own in a fire. When one of them got up in the middle of the night they discovered a fire and they had no time to take anything. They escaped with only the clothes they were wearing. It was a terrible loss and there was a degree of irony. They lived in the hills above Berkeley and Oakland and when a massive fire ten years earlier wiped out many houses, theirs was the only one to be saved on their street. 

I visited with them last summer. They talked about the trauma. They talked about the anguish of losing their most beloved things. They talked about the frustration of having to go out and get something new when before they had had that thing for a long time and very much took it for granted. But they also talked about how they are feeling a kind of freedom about not having all this stuff to worry about like they did before. They said they were surprised at how much stuff they really don’t miss. For them it is a starting over that they would not have chosen to experience, but also one that has had its share of surprises. They are now still deciding what they will do, whether they will rebuild whether they will move someplace else.

I don’t think that any of us would want to be forced to downsize or make a change in such a way. But it does prompt some questions about what is most important in our lives and where we want to go.

What are the most important things you have?  What are the things that you really could live without?

How would you like your life to be different and how might you make space for that to happen? What is it you want to clear out of your life? Where is it you would like to make space?

How do the choices I make put me in right relationship with other living beings and the creation we share?

Robert Rosenstone tells the story of a Japanese artist who was commissioned by an American to do a painting. The completed work had, in a lower corner, the branch of a cherry tree with a few blossoms and a bird perched upon it. The entire upper-half of the painting was white. Unhappily, the American asked the artist to put something else in the painting because it looked, well, so bare. The artist refused the request. When pressed for an explanation, the artist said if he did fill up the painting, there would be no space for the bird to fly.

Most of us, I think, struggle with our priorities, with the things that we have or don’t have. We want our lives to be full and beautiful. But there’s no magic formula that we follow. Simplifying our life doesn’t just mean getting rid of things. It means getting rid of the things that we don’t need and that are taking up space we don’t have to spare. It means letting go of the trivial and meaningless things and making space for what is emerging.

And it is not just our physical space, of course, but our mental and emotional space as well. If we can find that time and that space, then we might find ourselves better able to discover what it is we hope to discover. For each of us, it is keeping ourselves open to where the path might lead and having the courage to follow it.

Hopefully, when we greet a new year next January, we will give thanks for the year that has been, for the snow days and all the other days, and say, finally, that it has been a good year. It was a year where I found myself where I hoped to be.

PRAYER

Great spirit, we give thanks for all that is our life. We give thanks for every day, for every hour. Help us to live our lives with intention. Help us to live mindful of others and of the earth. Help us to know what we need and what we can live without. Roots hold me close, Wings set me free. As blessings come to us, may we be sources of blessing to the world. May this be our symphony. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Have courage to make space in your heart and live in faith that you will know life more abundantly. Go this day in love and in peace. Amen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Copyright  2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.